Tag: Shakespeare

Back in February 2010, the Guardian posted an article titled “Ten rules for writing fiction.” Celebrated authors had been invited to submit ten of their writing rules. But rules often break down under pressure, we might find writers breaking their own, or the examples held up for adulation contain so many exceptions that the rule is…

Evidence for the claim that Shakespeare did not write Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and the rest, is often cited reasoning that an uneducated farm-boy moved to the city lacks the formal education necessary to explain the depth of knowledge, experience, and wisdom found in the plays. Though prowess with language is not necessarily a school learned…

“To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin,” says Mark Twain’s duke as he prepares to take down the house with an encore of Hamlet’s soliloquy. Where’s an English major when you need one? They were no doubt in short supply in the Mississippi Valley in the early nineteenth century, and their…

“Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel”: Sister Mary Annette read Hamlet to our 8th grade class, and since Polonius’s advice had the imprimatur of both Sister and Shakespeare, we took it to be infallible. Sister’s point, if not Polonius’s, was that we would all wind…

In Gaston Bachelard’s the Poetics of Space, a philosophical study of the spaces we inhabit, open, and close, our houses, chests, nests, and more, in the chapter titled “Shells,” we find this quote from Gaston Puel: “This morning I shall tell the simple happiness of a man stretched out in the hollow of a…

Harold Bloom prefers his literature neat, and not served with a twist. Adverse to literary criticism that substitutes a doctrinaire reading for the actual text, Bloom’s approach to reading is summed up in his epigraph, from the Wallace Stevens poem “The House was Quiet and the World was Calm”: “The reader became the book; and summer night…

Virginia Woolf was not a common reader, not a common woman, not a common person at all. Yet we like her description of a common reader, defining as it does the utility player-fan, driven by “common sense,” and “uncorrupted by literary prejudices,” and so “differs from the critic and the scholar,” in that “he reads…

Throughout his “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,” Harold Bloom riffs on the falling from academic favor his aesthetic critical view. The riffs underscore his concerns for the deterioration of education. Yet he insists there’s still a common reader out there who cares: “Common readers, and thankfully we still possess them, rarely can read Dante;…

In “The Gutenberg Galaxy” (1962), Marshall McLuhan was the first modern blogger. Though published in traditional book form, the structure resembles many of today’s blogs. Norman O. Brown followed suit with “Love’s Body,” in 1966. McLuhan and Brown built their books on a framework of short paragraphs full of quotes, or links, to a cornucopia…